From the top of a fire tower on Pack Monadnock last year, Ernie Kirouac helped triangulate the coordinates of a blaze in Stoddard.
“I didn’t see it initially because it was out over this way,” Kirouac said pointing in the direction of Stoddard from the tower on a Tuesday morning earlier this month. “The fellow over at Pitcher Mountain called me and said, ‘be on the lookout, I got smoke and I can’t find it.’”
Kirouac, who is the Forest Protection Bureau’s primary tower watchman on Pack Monadnock, then pulled out his glasses. All of a sudden he could see the smoke billowing over the top of the ridge.
“I gave him a line on it and we were right on it,” Kirouac said.
The fire in Stoddard is one of many Kirouac has seen during his time manning the tower.
“Too many,” Kirouac said when asked how many fires he has spotted over the years.
The method of detecting fires from the tops of towers dates back to the early 1990s. Doug Miner, a forest ranger with the Forest Protection Bureau, said back then there were about 70 towers across the state.
He said in the 1980s the legislature started slashing the budget and the number of manned towers plummeted. Today, the fire tower on Pack Monadnock is one of only 16 fire towers across New Hampshire — 15 of which are owned and administered by the state.
New Hampshire Forest Protection Bureau Chief Steve Sherman said the ones that were kept in operation were staffed with full-time seasonal employees up until 2008 when the recession struck the area. Now, towers are staffed only on high fire danger days.
“That funding just hasn’t returned,” Sherman said.
Less staffed hours in the towers has had many impacts, Miner said, including a decreased ability to maintain the structures throughout the summer season, and an increase in vandalism.
Miner said despite a decline in operating towers and staffing hours, they are still useful tools for detecting fires.
“Someone might see smoke out in the woods, but it’s hard to see exactly where it is,” Miner said. “It takes a lot of the guessing game out of it as to where in the woods that fire is.”
From the top of the tower, Kirouac is able to pinpoint smoke columns using an Osborne Fire Finder (basically a giant map with a compass on it). With that information, he uses a large map covered in colored string to locate the fire’s GPS coordinates.
“It basically goes back to elementary and middle school math, laying out the lines and seeing which ones intersect,” Miner said.
He said the measurements are “extremely accurate” and can pinpoint a location within a matter of several feet.
The coordinates are then phoned into the local fire department.
There are other methods for detecting fires, like surveying land with a plane, and satellite technology, but both are expensive alternatives. New Hampshire has supplemented some of its fire surveillance with planes on high fire danger days as a way to monitor blind areas that staff in the towers can’t spot. Miner said the method is best used in conjunction with staff in the fire towers. Satellite monitoring is also an option, although it’s a development that’s problematic in the east because the units aren’t able to detect fires until the blaze is quite large.
And when it comes to fires, Miner said, time is of the essence.
Miner said finding coordinates from the fire tower takes about two to five minutes.
“The sooner we can spot a fire, the sooner fire departments can be dispatched, and the sooner they can be put out,” he said.
For the second most forested state in the nation with 4.8 million acres of forestland that makes up 84 percent of the state’s landscape, detecting fires quickly before they rage out of control is important. It becomes especially important on hot, dry years like last summer when the duff layer dries out and can smolder underground for long stretches of time.
“We still see the value in [fire towers], and the legislature still supports them,” Miner said.
Abby Kessler can be reached at akessler@ledgertranscript.com.